The collapse of civilisation on Easter Island

You were proud of what you had created. The statues of your ancestors watching over you, connecting you to the earth’s great power.

You worshipped them and remembered how the great ancestor Hotu Matu’a stepped ashore from his endless journey across the South Pacific to an island forested with giant palms for syrup and wine, and deep seas teaming with porpoise. You prospered. Each new family cleared more land and you began to carve the magnificent Moai with powerful jutting chins and magic coral eyes.

With rope and wood, you helped the Moai walk across the island to stand in line with the stars.

But you had felled so many trees the rains made the soil thin. You grew hungry. Your connection to the earth’s power was weakening. The only answer: bigger Maoi. Day and night you carved, but it was not enough. The last crop failed.

You looked across the blasted island; no tree remained; no boat to fish or to use to escape.

They found you by chance in 1722 on Easter Sunday, calling it a redemption. But Easter Island offered no second chance. Life had spiralled into violence and hunger and despair. That is how you came to topple each other’s Moai and eat your own kin.

The last passenger pigeon

You were fourteen, used to helping on the farm. Seeing a strange bird in the corn, you took the family gun and brought it down in a single shot. You were proud of that. How could you have known the blue-grey bird in your hands was the last wild passenger pigeon?

Your parents remembered the migrating flocks that took days to pass, blackening the skies, drowning out all sound in the thunder of wings. Such graceful birds; separating in a whirl of powerful wings round a predator, making a moving shadow rounds its talons. Safety in numbers was how they survived, how they lived.

Man was a different kind of predator; tracking them to their breeding grounds, culling them in their thousands, loading their carcasses onto the newly-opened railroads to the towns. When their numbers started to fall, conservationists called for limits, but legislators saw no need; it would be like protecting ants.

Seasons passed. The forests thinned. Settlers cleared the land. The weakened flocks somehow couldn’t reform. By the time the bill came in 1897 it was too late.

There were five billion passenger pigeons, they were the most common bird in America, possibly on the planet; and in less than a century you were killing the very last one.

The burial of the city of Antioch

You built a city renowned through history.

Its temples and palaces live on in the dusty chronicles; such carefully planned streets; aqueducts crossing mountains bringing water to every house. You made this city great: golden Antioch, a jewel, a wonder, fair crown of the Orient.

It was to you that St Paul first preached. Your cosmopolitan voice gave Christians their name. But you weren’t reverent; known for your sarcastic take on the world, you loved to fight and indulge in the delights of the flesh in Daphne’s Grove.

When you stood in the hill-top temples, did you ever worry how big the city had grown? How its sprawling metropolis filled the plain? How your insatiable need for more wood had stripped the hills of trees? Did you notice how the new farms quickly became barren? The rain running off their slopes heavy with mud? Perhaps you didn’t understand the fragile balance of root and tree, water and soil?

In the end you had no choice. The rains washed so much soil off the hills that the Orontes River silted up. You left in search of a better place, leaving behind the wondrous city you had built.

Today your ancient city of Antioch lies eleven metres under the plain